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A fragment of an ancient gourd found at a burial site in Peru has forced archaeologists to rethink their ideas about the origins of organised religion in the Americas.

The 4,000-year-old artifact, which clearly bears the distinctive image of a primitive deity, suggests that organised religion may have been around as early as 2250 BC, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Archaeology. This is 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

"This appears to be the oldest identifiable religious icon found in the Americas," said Dr Jonathan Haas, curator of North American anthropology at The Field Museum of natural history in Chicago. "Imagine if you had the first depiction of Christ."

Members of an archaeological team found the gourd fragment along the coast of Peru, 190 km north of Lima, while collecting surface artifacts at a looted cemetery in July 2002. It immediately piqued their interest because it surfaced in an urban centre in the Patavilca River Valley that they knew to have been settled during the third millennium before Christ.

The region was densely populated between 2600 BC and 2000 BC, and appears to have been the ancestral home of Andean civilisation that culminated 3,500 years later in the Inca. Radiocarbon dating later confirmed the archaeologists' suspicions that the piece - apparently preserved by the arid coastal climate - pre-dated similar religious artifacts found elsewhere in the Andes.

The age, together with the unmistakable image of the Staff God - the principal deity in South America for thousands of years - convinced Haas and his colleagues that they had made a major discovery.

"Like the cross, the Staff God is a clearly recognisable religious icon," said Haas. The icon "indicates that organised religion began in the Andes more than 1,000 years earlier than previously thought."

The deity is typically portrayed with a fanged mouth; splayed and clawed feet; a staff in one or both hands, and oftentimes with snakes incorporated in its headdress or garments. A second gourd fragment with a similar drawing was recovered from a nearby cemetery on stony outcrops east of the modern town of Barranca and has not been carbon dated yet.

But Haas and his colleagues believe that the evidence they have uncovered strongly suggests that organised religion - one of the defining characteristics of civilisation - was around in the New World in much the same time-frame as it was seen in other ancient civilisations in Egypt and China.